Tapping TerrorismTeam Bush has made fighting terrorism
the centerpiece of the
president's re-election campaign, yet America is not saferby Bill Berkowitzwww.dissidentvoice.org
October 30, 2004

T

Since the 9/11 terrorist
attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, it was clear that
Election 2004 would turn on the threat of terrorism in the homeland. Whether
that threat was real or imagined when Karl Rove set out his strategy for
Team Bush, terror was at its core. The guiding principles were spelled out
in the president's 2003 budget -- published in the summer of 2002. In
"Securing the Homeland, Strengthening the Nation," the Bush Administration
staked its claim to the permanent war against terrorism: The threat of
terrorism had become "an inescapable reality of life in the 21st century...
a permanent condition to which America and the entire world must adjust."

In April 2003, the New York
Times' Adam Nagourney and Richard W. Stevenson reported that the Republican
Party's convention -- scheduled for New York in September 2004, just prior
to the third anniversary of 9/11 -- would usher in a 3-month sprint to the
finish line with Bush waving the banner of fighting the war against
terrorism: "The framework for the general election campaign," Nagourney and
Stevenson wrote, is being "built around national security and Bush's role in
combating terrorism."

In a November 2003 visit
with troops at Fort Carson, Colorado, the president framed the campaign's
fear-mongering refrain: "We are fighting the terrorists in Iraq and
Afghanistan and in other parts of the world so we do not have to fight them
in the streets of our own cities."

Although Bush's sprint to
the finish line has been marked by all sorts of potholes -- escalating US
casualties in Iraq, 380 tons of weapons gone missing after US troops arrived
in country, report after report detailing the administration's feckless
behavior during the occupation -- Team Bush has never veered from its
message: There could be another major terrorist attack on the United States
if John Kerry becomes president.

From Memorial Day through
July 4, the Department of Homeland Security cranked out a series of terror
alerts. Soon after, warnings that Al Qaeda could disrupt the November
elections were issued. When the administration spoke, the media pumped up
the volume.

In reality, however, other
than the anthrax attacks in 2001 -- which still remain unsolved -- the US
has thankfully experienced only a series of false alarms: Terrorist attacks
on bridges, water systems, transportation hubs, and nuclear power plants
haven't happened; there have been no chemical or biological attacks; no
"dirty bombers" or suicide bombers have been apprehended; and the
possibility of a smallpox epidemic -- the president received a
highly-publicized smallpox vaccination and encouraged first responders to
follow his lead -- never materialized.

"Today's terrorists can
strike at any place, at any time, and with a wide variety of weapons," the
White House document warned. "The most urgent terrorist threat to America is
the Al Qaeda network. We will prosecute our war with these terrorists until
they are routed from the Earth. But we will not let our guard down after we
defeat Al Qaeda. The terrorist threat to America takes many forms, has many
places to hide, and is often invisible. We can never be sure that we have
defeated all of our terrorist enemies, and therefore we can never again
allow ourselves to become overconfident about the security of our homeland."

As time passed, the urgency
-- not the memory -- unleashed by 9/11 began to fade. To ensure that
terrorism wouldn't disappear from center stage, the administration used all
the tools at its disposal including Tom Ridge's Department of Homeland
Security, which periodically ratcheted up its color-coded Homeland Security
Advisory System elevating security alerts from yellow -- significant risk of
terrorist attacks -- to orange -- high risk of terrorist attacks. These
warnings sustained public anxiety even when later information proved the
threats had been over-hyped or based on inconclusive or false information:
When the advisory system was cranked-up, polls found that Americans became
more fearful of a possible terrorist attack. Ridge even became fodder for
late-night television's comedic talents when in 2003, his Duct Tape &
Plastic Sheeting Advisory created a panicked buying frenzy at America's big
box retail outfits.

During the same period,
Attorney General John Ashcroft would command center stage and announce that
the Justice Department had apprehended some high-profile terrorist; suspects
that turned out to be neither terrorist nor significant apprehensions.

Prior to the March 2003,
invasion of Iraq the administration initiated Operation Liberty Shield.
Operation Liberty Shield promised to protect the ports and waterways,
increase surveillance and monitoring of America's borders, provide detaining
of suspected terrorists, stronger airport, rail and road protection, greater
monitoring of terrorist suspects, increased public health preparedness, and
to have federal response resources "positioned and ready."

Team Bush claimed that
terrorists could unleash multiple attacks against U.S. and Coalition targets
worldwide in the event of a U.S.-led military campaign against Saddam
Hussein. The invasion came and went and in the twilight of the quagmire of
occupation, there have been no terrorist attacks in the homeland.

It is fair to say that now,
more than three years after 9/11 and 19 months after Bush's invasion of
Iraq, many people have accepted the notion that we are fighting terrorism in
Iraq so we don't have to fight it in Boise, Boston or Boca Raton. Yet,
despite the administration's epoxy-like grip on the issue of the war against
terror, questions abound as to how successful the administration has been in
pursuing terrorists.

Consider the Department of
Homeland Security: How is it functioning these days?

Despite nearly 200,000
employees and a budget of almost $27 billion, reporter Matthew Brzezinski in
his lengthy investigation of Tom Ridge's operation for Mother Jones
magazine, charges that: "Hamstrung by special interests, staffed with B-team
political appointees, and crippled by a lack of funding and political
support, DHS is a premier example of how the administration's misplaced
priorities -- and its obsession with Iraq -- have come at the direct expense
of homeland security."

While "the war on terror
has many fronts," Brzezinski writes, "not the least of which is the one
right here at home," the author of "Fortress America: A Inside Look at the
Coming Surveillance State," concludes that "defending the homeland simply
doesn't appear to have captured the imagination of the White House the way,
say, a firefight in Falluja does."

The situation at the
Guantanamo Naval Base in Cuba indicates how wrong the Bush policy of
rounding up terrorists and locking them away has been. In addition to
charges that prisoners captured in Afghanistan and shipped to Guantanamo
were tortured, it now appears that the military may not have captured many
terrorists at all. In fact, as Lt. Col. Thomas Berg recently told the New
York Times, we may have merely captured "the slowest guys on the
battlefield?"

With the situation at
Guantanamo degenerating into what the San Francisco Chronicle's Jon Carroll
recently called "not only an unholy mess and a human rights disaster,
[but]... a pointless unholy mess and human rights disaster," the situation
in Iraq bogged down and the homeland no safer than it was three years ago,
Americans are not better off with President Bush leading the fight against
terrorism. "If you believe that terrorism is the No. 1 threat to the
nation," Carroll writes, "why ever would you vote for George Bush?

Bill Berkowitz
is a longtime observer of the conservative movement. His
WorkingForChange.com column Conservative Watch documents the
strategies, players, institutions, victories and defeats of the American
Right.